Week in Tech: Does 'Workslop' Affect Your Workplace?

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech Stuff. I'm as Volocian and I'm Cara Price. Today we're going to get into the headlines this week, including an anti tech rally in New York City and a look at how workslop is affecting the workplace. Then, on Chat to Me.

I had students take personality tests in Spanish and then used AI to turn their personality data into unique paintings.

All of that on the Weekend Tech. It's Friday, October third, Hello, Cara, hi.

As.

One of the great pleasures of recording this podcast with you is getting to hear you chew ice right next to the microphone before we start. I hope your mouth is nice and cool.

I'm actually number I'm like talking like I just got a tongue pier.

My ears are numb as well.

Well. Speaking of being in the studio together, it's your turn in the hot seat now to make fun. Are you even wearing shoes today? Oh?

It's a deep cut. I actually am right now, but you obviously noticed that I do have an unconscious habit of slipping them off.

I do, and it's disgusting.

It is well, I consciously try and keep them on. In fact, but I did get in trouble. I think I probably told you the story many years ago when I was a consultant working on the Google account. I once unconsciously slipped them off in the Google office and was padding around Google's actually off, and my boss took me his side and said, listen, I was, You're a great guy, but if you ever take your shoes off and a fine meeting again, you're fired, which is totally fair enough.

It's such a power booth.

It was. I was so I whacked out that I was not even aware of it.

You had six hundred coffees probably.

By then, exactly. But that's why I was particularly delighted to be ahead of the curve on this. It's now the norm in Silicon Valley, apparently, according to the Fortune article you share to shame me in our full producers and host Slack channel with the headline the hottest workplace policy at startups right now no shoes So I'm curious, kra how would you feel if we had a shoes off policy at Cardoscope.

The thing is is that I am so obsessed with dumbing down the workplace to make workaholism.

Feel comfortable exactly, and that's exactly what this policy is all about, exactly. So that's interesting. There was actually a picture on the on the Fortune article of a shoe rack.

You see that It was like a Japanese restaurant.

Yeah, it looks like somewhere between a Japanese restaurant and a high school, right. I mean, it's like the locker full of like dirty trainers. I mean, it's really the aesthetics of the new Silicon Vallee.

Weird, but it's a sort of sinister trojan horse in the way that you know they used to. I mean, I was just reading in the article all of these ways that companies make offices more appealing, and I think going in and being like, you know what, I'm walking right back into my apartment to go to work is like.

Gotcha free haircuts, but shoes off.

That's right.

Well, I'm obviously obsessed by the workplace, sadly, so I couldn't resist this story in the Harvard Business Review, which went around the internet and had the headline AI generated work slop is destroying productivity.

When was the last time you heard the word slop?

I hear the word slop all the time now, Yeah.

It's weird. It's like AI has brought slop back into the conversation when it was never that, Like slop was not a thing.

You're so right that the twenty twenty six word of the year is slop. I do agree. I think I first I first started hearing at the beginning of this year AI slop, AI slop a stop, And now it's like everywhere so work slop. Well, guess what it is.

The bottom of the barrel.

Was AI generated crap that looks a little bit like real work. And I was pretty interested in this because I am not only the host of text stuff with you you are, I'm also the co founder of a podcast network called Kaleidoscope, which is the network that produces this podcast, and in my CEO hat, obviously in response to investors and culture and whatever else, I'm always encouraging our team. So how can we use AI? How can we be part of the air evolution? How can we

But if you're already sort of not in love with your CAR colleagues, now there's a new reason to think that your colleagues are slacking off.

Essentially, Yeah, I mean it's interesting, right. Not all AI assisted work is slop. Obviously is work slot, but there's also the sort of lazy thing where you say, oh, well, let me have AI generated the report and not think. And I think that's what this article is really about.

I looked at this article too. There's this idea of like the distinction between a pilot and a passenger. I can't exactly wrap my head around that.

Well, what do you imagine it is?

Well, a pilot flies the plane.

Yeah, what does the passenger do?

Rides the plane?

The plane sits in the back.

Are you a pilot or a passenger?

I'm not as much as a pilot as I would like to be with AI, honestly, but the distinction they're making is pilots are people who actually take these new genera AI tools and harness them to do better work, and passengers are people who use them either because their boss has told them to or because they're trying to short at doing their work. So essentially, you know, passengers churn out AI slop, and pilots, at least according to this study, use AI to be better workers.

This actually reminds me of one of my recent favorite party term drops, which is cognitive offloading, which you know, is when we offload critical thinking to generative AI and just how much that puts the person who's using AI at a deficit. And I think that slop, I guess, is a product of cognitive offloading.

It is, and interestingly, not just cognitive offloading on behalf of the employee, but also in many cases cognitive offloading on behalf of the boss. And a lot of these mandates whereas you're basically you have to use AI or use AI the persons I will, okay, but if you don't set a proper playbook for how to use it and some training for how to use it smartly, no surprise,

That's really crazy.

On top of that, MIT put out a report in July that found that ninety five percent of organizations are getting zero return. What do you mean by that, Well, I guess the benefits are not being realized in the real world by most people. The HBr thing goes on to talk about how, based on self reporting, forty one percent of employees say they're dealing with AI slop and each instance of ailop cost them almost two hours to

That's a lot of money to fix the slop. Actually, do you think it is going to stop people from integrating AI tools or stop founders like yourself?

Now? Definitely not. Because it's exciting and it has a tremendous promise and it could change the world. At the same time, there is this deep irony here, right, So it may not really work right now, but if it does work and we don't invest in it, we're dead in the water.

All right. So moving away from the workplace, I want to talk about a staggering figure I read in an article from Business Insider this week, which is this five hours of daily screen time equals fifteen years of life by the age of seventy.

Man, that's depressing. I think I'm closer to ten hours.

You think you're on ten hours of screen?

I just phone and computer to phone computer.

Is Is that your life or is that another life that could be lived?

Definitely the latter.

It's crazy. H Well, So this was in a Business Insider article about a group of people who are kind of reclaiming the term Luddite, who gathered at the Highline in New York City to protest the use of screens.

Essentially, yeah, I just you mentioned reclaiming the term luddite. Luddite is used as a smear or has been used as a smear to describe people who have like a

I think in this case it has a lot for these people who were gathering. I don't know how much it had to do with the state of work, as it had to do with how much time we are wasting on our screens and what the human cost of

Interesting lots of critique about the tech industry. Do you think that dressing as a gnome will make the lords of the universe? Can the boots?

I don't think quake in their boots necessarily. I think there's a sort of tongue in cheek aspect to this rally. The hats were one example of that. There's also the name of the event, which I loved, scathing hatred of information technology and the passionate hemorrhaging of our neoliberal experience, which, as you may guess, is an acronym for shit phone.

I don't think I've used the words neoliberals since I was in college. For that, I've never used Neil's the core of that message.

Yeah, you know. According to the Reporter and Business Insider, the goal is to actually advocate for healthier relationships with technology and quote in the article to take a conscious step back from the social media apps, which I agree with and need to implement in my own life. I was actually telling you this before we started the show, that there was this very serendipitous moment where a woman came into the coffee shop where I was working, and

Exactly that's living that life. Yeah, I mean, how old was this woman?

She must have been our age.

Okay, yeah, but the protests and they're gen z their gen z. And I think one of the trends which is emerging is that the most anti tech generation is the generation who grew up most on tech, which is kind of interesting.

I think that's because they never grew up without it, and so I think there is a little bit of a nostalgia for a time that they never had. It's like me using vinyl, you know what I mean, Like, I think it's cool because I didn't have to use it. But Oz, this small but mighty rally wasn't the only tech rejection I heard about over the weekend. Have you actually been in the West fourth subway stop recently?

I have?

Have you seen the ads for friend dot com?

No? Well I have seen them not in West Fourth Street. I saw them in another subway stations. At these like big white posters with a picture of a mysterious device and a Dictionary definition of the word friend.

Those are actually ads for a wearable device called Friend, and the ad copy says things like I'll never bail on dinner plans, you know, stuff like that. I originally found this story that I'm telling you right now on Tumblr. I actually didn't see it in the subway and there was like a thread on tumbler full of pictures of

In other words, people objected to this very much, company claiming ownership of the word friend. That's exactly the product though, is like a wearable AI.

This is a wearable device that looks like a miniature smart speaker that you wear around your neck. It listens to you all day like a friend. It collects your data and then you can talk with it via text about what's going on my friend, Yeah text, I mean this is a lot of my relationships are like this. And according to Adweek, friend dot com spent over one

I read that Avi Schiffman raised five million dollars for Friend a year ago and spent, as you mentioned, one million on this campaign. And he said to Adweek, I don't have much money left. I spent it all on this. It's a huge gamble. This makes me laugh because I have a pretty strong feeling and you know, I'm waiting to be corrected that Friend will not take off as a product.

I think think what's really funny about it is that sometimes the marketing is the thing itself. And I think it's really funny that people are engaging so much in the defacing of these ads. And I think what's interesting is that people know exactly what it is when they look at the ad, and they also know that they don't want to engage in using it. And so I think the proof is in the putting in terms of

I think the big question for me really is, will this anger and frustration there's coalescing around the role of technology in our lives. Will it become a political force. Will it be organized enough and durable enough to actually drive any change in the way technology is used, the way it's regulated. I mean, it's you know, it's really it's really really hard to make society. What changes. Of course, it did happen with cigarettes and sugar, ELTs and sugar,

Yeah I did.

I'm going to ask you now, do you play video games? Hell? Yeah you do.

I know I knew you didn't, and I was wondering if you're going to ask me, what do you play I'm a big Moriocart eight switch user.

Oh interesting, yea.

I fall asleep with it on me all the time and it hits me in the face and then I wake up.

So as a resounding yes, yes, have you heard the story about electronic arts this week?

E A Sports It's in the game. If I say that to my sister, she'd be like, yep, I know exactly what you're talking about.

So it's a massive video game company, both titled like Fifa, Madden and the Sims, and it has agreed to go private for the price of fifty five billion dollars. According to The New York Times. If the deal goes through, it will be the largest buyout of a publicly traded company ever, not adjusting for inflation.

So what happens to the shareholders?

They get money two hundred and ten dollars per share, which is a twenty five percent premium to the company's share price as a public company.

So who's paying for this? This is just crazy money.

The group of investors led by Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, Infinity Partners, which is Jared Kushner's private equity firm, and finally, another firm Silver Lake, who also rumored to be part of the TikTok deal.

So that is the other huge deal that's said to be decided in the coming months.

I mean to me, these stories go side by side. Obviously, Jared Kushner being involved in the EA deal and you benefiting from his Trump connections. The TikTok deal has, you know, Larry and David Ellison front and centered in a deal being broken by the Trump administration and the Chinese government. It's interesting to me, you know how US technology capitalism is kind of more and more integrating with the state, or at the very least the Trump the Trump Friends and Family.

Circle, Yes, Trump fn F as we'd like to call it. So what's going to happen next in this electronic arts buyout.

Well, the deal has to be approved by the government's Committee on Foreign Investment, which reviews foreign buyouts for security concerns. There are concerns about data, of course. I mean a lot of people play video games in the US, which means there's a lot of data that could be collected by a foreign government.

So do you look at app store charts?

I look at podcast charts because.

You want to see how your podcasts are doing because you're a founder. That's why I actually look at the App store charts sometimes because I think it's really interesting what's trend Usually it's the same stuff that's trending. But last week I actually noticed that there was this new app that I'd never seen before called Neon Mobile at the top of the chart.

The top of the charts.

Yes, it was at the top of the charts, and then it disappeared or it stopped being used for a privacy issue.

Well why was it so popular in the first place?

Because people were making money?

Of course, Okay, back up a couple of steps. What is neomobile and how are people making money from it?

So the app basically offered to pay you money for recordings and transcripts of your side of phone calls, which was data that they would then sell to AI companies.

So you'll bet I basically, as a Neon user, would allow Neon to record my calls, my private calls, and then sell them on to other companies.

I when you say.

It like that, how much people getting paid?

What the website says about Neon is that they pay thirty cents per minute if you're calling another Neon user, so if you had Neon and I had Neon and we were calling each other, they would pay us thirty cents per minute. If I was calling a non Neon app user, it's fifteen cents per minute. The max that you can make is thirty dollars a day. Last week, this free app had thousands of users and was downloaded

So it wasn't just that you were consciously selling your phone calls to companies. There was also a kind of unconscious or there was actually flaw which meant that everything you did while using Neon was exposed to everyone else on Neon. Good old journalism, and that's why, as you mentioned, it went offline.

Yes for now, for now. So Neon actually intends to come back with a vengeance, but they have not given any indication of how long it will take to fix the privacy flaw. The reason I sent this to our producers is because I was going to sign up for it, Yeah, because I'm a.

Free thirty dollars a day not bad. That's like three that would be thirty dollars a day, thirty cents a minute, that's one thousand. That's a thousand, even outstrip your average minutes per day on the phone.

But I think that the average user relates to me and sees paid for phone calls with no downside. Yeah, I'm going to sign up for that.

Why not say there is a downside?

There was a huge downside. I think the takeaway here is that be very cautious of when you download any apps that are permissioned to record your phone calls and access your contacts.

One hundred percent. The takeaway for me is slightly different, which is how you know, this surveillance society doesn't need to be imposed, like we kind of volunteer for it ourselves. And we're talking about Larry Ellison, but he said last year citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.

I think what is evidence here is that people have gotten a little bit cynical about surveillance capitalism and they're like, you know what.

Pay me for it's happening anyway, pay me for that.

That's exactly right.

You know, elsewhere in the world, AI is actually being regulated, and Italy passed the landmark law last week that addressed a number of issues that have bubbled up on tech stuff over the last few months.

What are some of the issues that have bubbled.

Up well, per Reuters, the new regulations in Italy include restrictions on copyrighted content for AI driven text, required parental consent for AI access for children under the age of fourteen, which, by the way, I think is a huge one huge in forced transparency around AI use in the workplace, Employees will be required to inform workers when AI is being deployed, and in the healthcare setting in particular, AI is allowed to be used to assist in diagnosing patients, but doctors

That last one actually reminds me of the conversation we had with Robert Capps about AI in the workplace and how transparency and accountability are going to be a huge part of our jobs as human AI collaboration grows more popular.

I think that's right. I mean, these are a lot of these are guidelines for how to work in an ethical way with AI, but there is also a section devoted to AI crime and punishment, prison terms ranging from one to five years for people who quote use technology to cause harm such as generating deep fakes, and even harsher penalties for those who use AI to commit crimes like fraud and identity theft. So when I said that this law addresses a lot of things we've talked about

That's what I was just thinking.

And yeah, this is, to be fair, built on top of an EU AI law that was passed a few months ago and it is being implemented in stages, and EU as a whole, I think has this kind of reputation of being the regulator in chief. But also it doesn't have the political clout of China and the US.

Other words, good for Italy, But yeah, does it matter for anyone else?

Going to be any more relevant than the Colosseum.

So the last story I want to bring you is about one of my favorite subjects, which is AI in Hollywood, which brings me to a very popular story this week about Tillie.

Norwood, who is Tillie Norwood.

Tilly Norwood has been all over my Instagram feed all week because I work, as you know, in show business when I'm not doing this, and I noticed on my Instagram feed all these people are making like loll Tilly Norwood, Loll, Who's going to sign Tilly Norwood? And I googled Tillie Norwood last week and it turns out that Tillie Norwood is AI hold On.

So you became aware of Tillie Norwood before you became aware she was an AI character, That's correct. You were like a star is born. I gotta know more.

Well, Like people were posting photos of her, and I was like, is she an actress? Am I supposed to know? Or is she a new angeneu? And then I mean, I'm kind of exaggerating, but like very quickly I googled her and I realized, Oh, she's AI.

Why had everyone suddenly come alive being fascinated by this one AI generated figure actress? I mean, there's so many.

There's a very specific reason. Actually, they're looking for an agent who's going to sign her. They're treating, and so a lot of the further kind of discourse on Instagram was like making a joke like Lowell, who's Tilly going to go with?

And for?

I might be wrong and this might have been something that people talked about with other sort of AI generated characters, but this is the first time I've seen an AI actress be talked about in the way that other actresses are talked about.

What actor has been saying.

They're basically saying that like this is bullshit, They're like, this is this could literally come for our jobs. I want to actually read you these two quotes from Tilly's creator, Aileen van der Velden. She put out a statement on Instagram saying Tilly Norwood is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work, a piece of art. I see AI as not a replacement for people, but

Do you think Scott Johansson Natalie Portman identify more with being a tool or paint brush. What do you think? I don't think more as humans.

I mean, I guess, I know. I know what she's saying in terms of actors read lines, but it's a I think that's blurring the lines between being a person or technology in a way that people are uncomfortable with. Still, SAG actually put out a statement and in that statement they claim that Tilly was trained using performances from actors without permission or compensation, which is actually out of compliance with their new union contract. And girsh which on Entourage

Well, that's funny. I wonder, I wonder if she will end up getting signed by one of the major agencies.

It's like the most lol thing to me that and it's so agency. It's like, here's a product or a commodity that is hot, right now, go chase after it. I don't think anyone at the agencies is like overthinking the fact that she's AI. I think actors are like, wait a second, the agency that represents me is looking to represent an AI. Is that are they condoning, you know, movies being made with AI actors in them. And I think that that's a fair question for actors to be asking.

Okay, Kara is time for Chatting me nowment where we hear from our listeners about how they're using AI in

Is that person real? This week we heard from Sean. His voice is real and he is a digital communications lead at what we in the US call a technical college, and part of Sean's job is to teach both his students and his colleagues to incorporate AI responsibly.

I'd be interested to get his take on the work slop story we talked about. Well.

I think in this this case, Sean is clearly a pilot, not a passenger. Unlike me. He's been thinking very creatively about how to harness AI for his work, and he says his school wants to use AI to reduce workload on the staff, enhance creativity, and support personalized learning.

I had students take personality tests in Spanish and then used AI to turn their personality data into unique paintings. We then held an exhibition where other Spanish speakers could engage with the students, who had to introduce the pieces and answer questions.

I love this sort of paradigm of human machine human machine engagement and making which I've been in Sean's class.

I also like that he's not just an AI booster, that he actually sees the whole picture.

While we're enthusiastic about AI, we're also careful about using it responsibly. I have worked with senior leaders to issue clear AI guidance for students and staff to outline how these tools should and shouldn't be used. In practical terms, this means AI is to be used as a supportive tool, not as a way to do a teacher's or a

So in case anyone was wondering what the opposite of WORKSLOP is, we can thank Sean because we have our answer.

Thank you Sean for submitting your chating.

Me and please listeners, we want to hear more from you. We want more chat and mes. Send your stories to tech Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com.

That's it for this week for tech Stuff.

I'm care Price and I'm os Valoschin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and Tyler Hill, who was executive produced by me Caarra Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katria Novel for iHeart Podcasts. The Engineer is Bihe Fraser and Jack Insley mix this episode Kyle murder rodat Theme Song.

Join us next Wednesday for Text Up the Story, when we will share an in depth conversation with David Ignatius all about spycraft and how the CIA is faring in the technological age.

And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen, and send us your thoughts at tech stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.